


Never Meet Your Heroes

by plinys



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: First Meetings, M/M, but it's totally not, could be read as gen i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-22
Updated: 2013-10-22
Packaged: 2017-12-30 03:06:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1013346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Because after years of letters and emails Newt sort of builds up this image of him in his mind, and facing reality is a bit startling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Meet Your Heroes

**Author's Note:**

> First time writing a fic for these two, but I couldn't help myself.

They say you should never meet your heroes, because they’ll only disappoint.  

In hindsight, Newton should have known this, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Three years of letters with far too many stamps, of international packages, of emailing each other daily, of smiling every time he noticed another message popping up in the corner of this screen.

Three years of over excited explanation points and caps lock that never turns off, of being greeted with perfectly polished English that would make his high school English teachers weep tears of joy, if he had ever been to a proper high school. (He hadn’t, but that was highly irrelevant.)  

Three years of slowly convincing to him to stop calling him Doctor Geiszler, because only his mother called him doctor, and three years of calling him Hermann from the get-go and getting a slightly less than pleased emoji in reponse. (“I never pegged you for type of person that used emojis _!!”)_

Three years of contemplating pressing the call button on skype, thinking about how easy it would be, but instead typing out a familiar greeting and pretending that that is enough. ~~It’s never enough.~~

 Things are easier this way, at least that’s what he tells himself, with time zones and all that. It sounds a lot better in his head. Though it doesn’t nearly do a good enough job of convincing himself that it’s true, it sounds like a lie even in his head.

At some point they exchange phone numbers, but they never call each other.

No matter how many times he sits up at night staring at a picture pulled up on google images or a lecture that some undergrad at the nerve to record, wondering what it would be like to have that face look at him and that voice saying his name. (But not in a creepy way.)

He ends up saving the number as speed dial two, only because speed dial one is used for his voice mail, and even though he’s not entirely sure that he will ever call the number it seems oddly fitting. For somebody he’s never actually met, he’s quickly become the most important person in Newt’s life. (Not that Newt would ever openly admit it.)

They almost meet once, there’s a conference that they were both expected to attend.

He had circled the date on his calendar, and will tell anybody that will listen how excited he is. Every other sentence is Hermann this and Hermann that, it had gotten to the point where he heard a few of the students giggling behind his back, and one of the newer ones made the mistake of referring to Hermann as his boyfriend. Newt didn’t have the heart to tell her that they hadn’t actually met yet.

It seemed like a highly irrelevant point, after all, it was like they knew each other already.

In the end there’s a Kaiju attack and Newt joins a group going to retrieve any matter that can be salvaged, the conference ends up being the last thing on his mind. He makes his apology later, in an email that probably could have passed for an undergraduate essay.

Hermann replies two days later, apologizing for a lack of internet connection, Newt tries to pretend that he wasn’t panicking for those two days. (Not panicking at all.)

There’s another year before an opportunity can present itself, by a crazy random happenstance they’re going to be in the same Shatterdome for not even the span of a twenty-four day, but it has to count for something. (It’s the closest they’ve ever got before.)

 So, Newt accepts the offer without a second thought.

He had been bouncing on his toes all day prepared for when they could talk science and things and good god, Newt just wanted to meet him, to rush out all the words he’s dreamed of saying, and to get a smile in return.

Everything looked so picture perfect in his mind, that he never considered things going any other way.

Really he should have considered things go bad, but planning ahead wasn’t exactly something that Newt ever did. He had always been the sort of person that just went with the flow and acted on impulse.

Of course, he never expected for such a blatant shut down, for somebody who had had looked up to, if not something more, to write him off as just another Kaiju groupie, inform him that he talked too much (something that Newt had been informed of many times before) and then effectively ending their conversation by telling him that all of his research was mundane at its best, nothing to be so excited about.

“Is human interaction a foreign concept to you?”

And alright, to be fair, maybe asking what crawled up his ass and died wasn’t the best response and especially not proceeding to follow it up by making fun of his stuffy accent and wondering if it would kill him to actually have a decent personality.

(Which wasn’t entirely fair, or true, but it didn’t stop Newt for referring to him as “a cheap Spock knockoff” to anybody who would listen for the few months. Only stopping when he realized he had always imagined himself to be a bit like Kirk, and frankly the parallels were freakishly annoying.)  

“Dude, whoever said never meet your heroes was fucking right,” at least, that’s what Newt whines into the phone later that night once he’s had far too many drinks. The person on the other end of the line hushes him and tells him not to be so dramatic, but Newt’s good at being dramatic, it’s one of his many skills. And to be fair, he has every reason to be dramatic. At least, that’s what he drunkenly insists and he rambles on, not even sure what he’s saying out loud anymore and what’s in his head.

There’s a laugh on the other end of the line, a bitter self-deprecating laugh, and he’s not even sure who he called anymore. But Newt finds that he doesn’t particularly care.

Hours later, when he’s passed out and woken up again, with the barest hints of a hangover at the back of his brain, he fumbles for his phone and nearly has a heart attack when he realizes the number that he called, very nearly. Newt spends the rest of the day wondering why he didn’t say anything, why he didn’t just hang up the phone.

He spends at least a week thinking of calling him back or sending something or fuck… in the end it’s not that he’s a coward or anything, there just isn’t anything else to say.

If Hermann wanted to talk to him then he would have called or something, he would have put forth a fucking effort. Clearly he hated him. (It was the only logical conclusion.)  

That doesn’t stop the draft section of Newt’s email to become filled with messages that he will never send, all addressed to the same person.

Newt tries to forget all about him, to focus on his research, his specimens in glass jars and his Kaiju research, but it’s not so easy when you work for the same people, when you’re research could directly affect the other. Still, somehow Newt manages to the best of his abilities.

When by chance they both end up at the Tokyo Shatterdome for a far longer period of time than their previous meeting, Newt does his best to remain as scarce as possible.

The one time they awkwardly end up passing each other in a hallway at the same time, Hermann somehow manages a stiff nod, before Newt turns altering his original path back to the labs. It seemed to be highly reasonable thing to do at the time. (He regrets it for weeks later.)

Though reasonable isn’t a word commonly used to describe Newton Geiszler.

Time passes, and somehow things go from bad to worse. (“As if the end of the world couldn’t get any worse.”)

 And at the brink of destruction he wakes up to an email in his inbox, it takes him a second to blink past the haze in his mind, and think that he must be dreaming. But there it is, waiting for him to open.

The email itself is brief and to the point, which is so like him that Newt doesn’t even seem surprised, though he does stare at the words “Dear Doctor Geiszler” for far too long to be healthy. He didn’t realize they had moved back to the mother level of formality, but it had been _years_ , and yeah it fucking sucks.

He says yes, because honestly, was there even a question there.

Newt had never learned to stay away from things that could hurt him, and that wasn’t going to change any time soon.

So, he packs up his jars and bottles and world possessions and high tails it to Hong Kong, because that sounds ten times better than building a giant wall. (“Like really man, who are they kidding with the fucking wall thing? That has to be the stupidest idea in existence.”)

At some point between, Hermann taping a line across the lab floor, and Newton blatantly disregarding it, something happens. Sometime that should have happened years before, because this time when he whines Hermann’s name in a mocking tone and gets called a mess or a Kaiju groupie in reply he find that he doesn’t actually mind that much. And if a piece of Kaiju entrails just happens to end up on Hermann’s side on the lab, then well, it was surely just an accident. (“Accidents happen, dude.”)

Something happens, something changes, and shifts without them really realizing it, and maybe Newt never really notices until they have to save the world and – “oh hey, we’re drift compatible.”

Maybe they were right when they said you should never meet your heroes, because, truth be told, he won’t be your hero anymore, but they never mention that he might be so much more than that. 


End file.
